Published 4:00 am, Friday, April 9, 1999

1999-04-09 04:00:00 PDT Washington -- Federally funded scientists wishing to conduct experiments on human embryo cells would first have to document that the cells were obtained from women in an ethical manner, according to draft federal guidelines discussed publicly for the first time yesterday.

But the idea that human embryo cells can be obtained or experimented upon ethically was immediately attacked as oxymoronic by critics of such research, setting the stage for a legal, scientific and political debate that is expected to stretch through the summer and could become part of congressional budget deliberations this fall.

The rules are being drafted at the request of National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus as part of a broader effort to grant federal researchers access to human embryonic "stem cells." The cells, which can be taken from the core of young human embryos created in laboratory dishes, have the potential to grow into all kinds of tissues such as blood, muscle, tendon and nerve. Scientists suspect they may someday be able to use the cells to grow replacement parts for people with various degenerative diseases.

Human embryonic stem cells were discovered last year by privately financed scientists, and many experts believe that useful applications would come more quickly if federally funded researchers could pursue the field as well. For the past four years, however, Congress has banned the use of federal funds for research in which human embryos are "destroyed, discarded or knowingly subjected to risk of injury or death."

Under the ban, federal scientists can't retrieve stem cells from human embryos because that process destroys the embryo. But attorneys in the Department of Health and Human Services recently concluded that the ban's wording does not preclude federal scientists from conducting studies on already isolated stem cells -- or on the progeny of those cells, growing in lab dishes -- as long as someone else retrieved the original cells with private funding.

That interpretation has come under fire from some legal scholars, ethicists and members of Congress and is under review by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission. But Varmus, working on the presumption that the Department of Health and Human Services' interpretation will prevail, has asked an advisory committee of the National Institutes of Health to come up with guidelines that federally funded stem cell researchers would have to follow. A working group of that committee discussed a near-final draft of those guidelines yesterday at a public meeting in suburban Bethesda, Md.

In accordance with a 4-year-old executive directive by President Clinton, which precludes scientists from creating human embryos solely for research, the new rules would insist that federal scientists use only stem cells retrieved from leftover embryos being discarded by couples who had made them for infertility treatments.

To avoid coercion of potential donors, the rules would not allow scientists to directly ask women to donate their embryos. Only independent intermediaries could do so, and they could make such requests only of women who had already decided, independently, to destroy their leftover embryos.

Women considering donating their embryos would have to be informed that the cells might be grown into tissues for permanent transplantation into patients. Women would not be allowed to direct their embryo cells for transplantation into a chosen recipient, as is currently allowed for some organ and blood donations.

In recognition of what ethicists have called an embryo's "special" moral status, the rules would prohibit women from selling their embryos. But the rules would not stop scientists or companies from profiting from the sale of tissues grown from the embryo cells.

Several representatives of scientific organizations spoke yesterday in favor of the National Institutes' effort to regulate its way into the stem cell field. "Stem cell research is too promising to impede, slow or stop," said Penelope Catterall of the Alliance for Aging Research.